[Terretta]

Every time this comes up, I ask if the “academic publishing industry” provides any service where I, as an individual, can subscribe for one reasonable subscription fee, to one single site, with all the research.

It seems no.

- No one service or site or subscription or pass

- No reasonable fee

- No aggregation of all the research

They’ve externalized the useful work back onto the user. Sci-hub does that work for me.

If I could pay $100/month* for sci-hub, I would.

* Footnote: Arbitrarily rating it as 3x more value than, say, Bloomberg. And while I think it should be a public service rather than a fee, if there is a fee, it likely should be geo-adjusted by global income bands: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/4085814679889422...

[neffy]

It's worse I think than is generally realised. Back about 8 years ago I looked into getting some kind of university level library access for independent research - was quite happy to pay a fairly significant amount. I tracked down one of the London Universities who offered this if you paid to join their library (it was a couple of hundred pounds then), turned up in person to do so, and was politely told this had just been shut down due to problems with the publishers. Looking back, because that had been the last of several options that had been recently shutdown, I have to think this was deliberate policy by the publishers.

Write to the author as a last alternative, they're usually more than happy to send you a copy, I've had a couple of instances where a paper copy of the requested work turned up in the mail.

[kwertyoowiyop]

Hard to believe this is the 21st century. :-(

[chubot]

Yes, this is a problem (or the problem). If you attend or work at a University, you probably have good access. Working at Google also provided me with pretty good journal access -- I don't think the same is true for other employers though.

Now that I'm independent, it's searching the web, e-mailing the authors of the paper, and SciHub. This system would be a lot worse without SciHub. (And yes I donated; in fact I used cryptocurrency for the first time to donate)

[wrycoder]

What about Deepdyve?

[Terretta]

Good question. They don’t make this obvious, but:

- you don’t get the article, you get a browser window

- they only have about 1/2 of the articles (!)

Quoting from their FAQ:

Q. What does "renting" mean?

Renting articles is the simple and affordable way to get the high quality articles that you want, with the same layout and formatting as the printed or PDF versions.

"Rented" articles are available through DeepDyve's cloud-based service and can be viewed through your browser from anywhere you have an internet connection.

Read full text articles as often as you want during the rental period, and depending on your plan, you may print a limited number of pages per month. However, rented articles cannot be downloaded or shared.

Q. Why can't I rent, download, or print some articles?

DeepDyve works with many publishers but unfortunately not all of them have given us permission to let our users rent, download, or print some/all of their articles.

If an article is marked as "Preview" it means we only have permission to display the abstract but nothing else. As for downloading PDF’s, approximately half of the articles in our collection can be purchased and downloaded directly from DeepDyve. For the remaining half, DeepDyve provides a link that takes you to the publisher site where you can purchase the PDF directly from them.

[wrycoder]

True, but you can store articles in folders online and bookmark them. You can print a certain number of pages per month - 25, I think, and that adds up. Is it really necessary or even useful to print out or store locally?

It seems like their viewable content is 20% of the available literature, and the coverage is increasing. They appear to have recently added APS journals current up to five years ago. Adding arxiv to that, the physics coverage is pretty good, especially for historical research. (You also can access APS journals via your local public library.)

[btrettel]

Is there a list of journals or publishers that are on Deepdyve? Seems to me that the only way to know if an article is on there is to sign up.

[wrycoder]

Yes, look at https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/

As an example of a topical search with no login:

https://www.deepdyve.com/search?query=COVID-19

Another search:

https://www.deepdyve.com/search?author=Doyle%2C+W.+T.

And a page from that search:

https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/american-association-of-physics-...

You get only one page when not logged in, but Deepdyve has all of American Journal of Physics, which is really nice.

Deepdyve has been submitted several times to HN over the past decade, but it never generates any interest. That's surprising, considering the interest in SciHub.

You can't read the full text w/o signing up for the free trial. Without registering, you can't bookmark articles or add them to folders, either.

[DarmokJalad1701]

Depends on the field. For example, none of the IEEE or AIAA journals are available there.

[wrycoder]

Yeah, IEEE is always a problem. Even IEEE members have to subscribe to individual journals, and there are a lot of them.

[btrettel]

While I'm not aware of anything quite like what you've described, some possibilities for accessing the scientific literature as an individual are discussed here: https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/how-do-you-access-recent-...

[leephillips]

I’ve collected a few ways to get papers at https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/

[throwaway38941]

Does the "social media industry" provide a service where you, an individual, can sign up to one single site, and access every social media post that exists?

No. Because they're different social media sites. They do not work together. They compete.